The Library Card Still Says First Year

The no-dues slip was a quarter of a page with six boxes printed on it, and by the second week of April Aman had five of them signed. Workshop, hostel, sports, accounts, department. Only the library was left, and the library was the one counter where he had something to hide.

He had been putting it off for eleven days. He did it the way everybody did it — waited for a long queue, on the theory that a long queue makes a person efficient — and stood at the back with the slip folded twice in his shirt pocket and a book in a plastic bag held flat against his leg.

Behind the counter Mrs Sethi had been sitting in the same chair for twenty-two years. Register on her left, stamp on her right, and the stamp was the only object on the desk permitted to make a noise. She did not look up at students; she looked at roll numbers, and she read them out before the owner of the number had finished arriving.

"Aman. Pharmacy. Fourth year."

"Ma'am."

"Slip."

He put it down. She turned it around with one finger and read it from the bottom, where the boxes were, upwards.

"Five," she said. "Library is the last one."

"Yes, ma'am."

She opened the drawer under the register. It was full of cards, the old kind, with a printed grid and a column for the date due and a column for the date returned, kept on long after the whole system had gone onto the computer, because Mrs Sethi had once said in a meeting that a computer could be asked a question and a card could be produced.

She found his roll number without seeming to look for it.

"First year," she said. "Pharmacognosy, practical manual. Issued in August, due in September."

The queue behind him shifted. Somebody's calculator fell on the floor and was picked up.

"Have you got it?"

There was a way to answer this. He had rehearsed two versions on the stairs: the one where he had lost it, and the one where he had lent it to a senior who had left the city. Both answers produced a fine, and a fine could be paid, and once it was paid the box would be signed and he would collect his gown on Friday like everybody else. That was the actual shape of the thing. A fine was cheap.

"It's at home," he said. "Under a cricket bat. In a box."

Mrs Sethi looked up for the first time.

She asked him what colour it was.

"Green," he said. "The cover is green, with a white band at the bottom, and the band has the publisher's name and a small drawing of a leaf."

"What else?"

He said the pages smelled of the shop the book had come from rather than of paper, and that the leaves inside were printed in two colours, and that the plate for the neem was the only one in the whole book drawn by hand instead of photographed, because the photograph had come out badly and nobody had ever replaced it. He said he had noticed that in the second week and had meant, for four years, to ask somebody why.

Mrs Sethi sat back. Then she brought out a second register from under the counter, the thick one, the one with the spine repaired in white tape, and turned it round so that he could see the page.

"There is no fine," she said. "The book was written off in the audit two years after you took it. Six copies were bought and five are on the shelf. The accounts closed the value."

"Then why is it still out?"

"Because the accession register does not close by itself." She tapped the page. "This column says whether the item is on the shelf or with a reader. When a thing is written off, the accounts write it off. Nobody writes it back. So it stays with a reader, and the reader stays with the register, and the register stays with me."

The boy behind Aman had stopped pretending not to listen.

"What do you want me to do?" Aman said.

"Write what happened to it." She pushed the slip towards him and laid a pen on top of it, a fountain pen, the nib worn to a soft blunt point. "Remarks. In the remarks."

He wrote: At home. Since first year.

Mrs Sethi read it upside down and did not correct his punctuation. She took the slip, opened the register to the page, dipped the stamp and brought it down twice, once on the slip and once on the line. The noise went through the room, and two people at the reading tables looked up the way people do when an aeroplane passes.

"Next," she said.

Aman stood there with the plastic bag against his leg. He had brought the book with him. It was in the bag, the green cover turned away, the library stamp along the top edge and, in the back, the card with the one date written in an ink that had gone brown — a date from a week before he ever spoke to the boy whose notes he would photocopy for four years. He had planned to hand it over. He had worked out the sentence he would say while handing it over.

"Ma'am—"

"Eight o'clock," she said, to the room. "The library is open till eight. After Friday it is closed for the vacation."

The girl with the calculator put her slip on the counter.

Aman went down the stairs with the slip in his pocket and the bag still in his hand, and at the bottom, where the corridor turned into the sun, he stopped and took the book out and opened it to the back. The card was still there. The single date was still there. He had renewed it in his head every semester since, which was not a thing the library accepted and which, according to the register, he no longer had to.

He put the book back in the bag, and the bag under his arm, and went to find out where the gowns were being given out.